When your customers start calling, you need to pick up the phone. In this day and age, if someone calls you, they are either very interested and willing to give you their money, or are in need and have a complaint. In either case, you can't afford to let the call go to voicemail. If you miss calls or messages, Prospects turn into Missed Opportunities. Customers turn into Dissatisfied Negative Advertisers. The best opportunity to get a raving fan is to help and over-deliver on the expectations of an unhappy customer. A prospect who is ready to buy will buy more if we make the buying experience a delight. A happy customer will tell one, maybe two of his/her friends, but an unhappy customer will tell five or maybe even ten people. Or worse. They will tweet about it to the whole world. Here is your bottom line.

PICK UP THE PHONE.

1. Don't let a call get unanswered.

The powerful smartphones employees carry around and the cloud contact center software like Mightycall make it easy for every small company to have an enterprise grade solution to pick up the phone, route it to the right people, provide enterprise grade interactive voice response and even include incoming tweets, likes, messages, emails and texts on top of voice calls. You can include your complete team in picking up the phone, wherever they are, on any device or landline, so that no customer call goes unanswered.

2. Get a professional phone number.

You need your own professional phone number. Not your cell phone number, not your home line number. It needs to be a number that always stays the same and can be routed to different people in your company based on their role, state and location. Do you use a gmail.com email as your professional email? No. For the same reason you shouldn't be using your personal phone number for your business. What if you were sick? On vacation? Disconnected for some reason? You simply can't afford it.

3. Gather data.

Turn every conversation with a customer into an insight. Have a human conversation with them. Listen to them, but also ask them questions. How did they find out about you? What do they like about you? How else can you help? What else can you do for them? People are so burned out by waiting forever on the phone for someone to pick up, and then, when someone does pick up, hearing the recorded mechanical voice, that simply out of relief from talking to a real human being they will open up and share their experience with you. Learn from it. Take notes. Improve. Deliver on it.

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Your to-do list:

Get a professional phone number.

Make sure that phone number is visible to your website, or create a CALL NOW button.

Sign up for a service like Mightycall to reroute customers' calls to your team members.

Create a guide for your team members on how to handle calls. Make sure it goes along the values of your company's brand. Give them freedom to improvise and make decisions on the fly.